Jason BerkowitzFounder, SEO Director, Break The Web · Making SEO Less Annoying for DTC Marketers • SEO Director & Founder of Break The Web

The One Thing You Can't Systematize in SEO #seo #seostrategy #criticalthinking #agencylife #podcast

18 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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1:18

In this podcast excerpt, the speakers discuss how SEO agencies can systematize most of their operational processes—such as deliverables, audits, templates, and client communications—through standard operating procedures (SOPs). However, they argue that critical thinking and soft‑skill interactions cannot be captured in an SOP, making them the one thing that cannot be systematized. They note that while predictability is valuable, SEO work often requires frequent pivots when tactics that seemed promising fail to deliver results. The conversation also touches on industry variability, acknowledging that a strategy that works for 80% of sectors may fall flat in the remaining niche, underscoring the need for adaptable, human‑driven judgment.

So how do you manage that to scale to like educate your team? Because I'm sure you have one or two people in a team that are the, the strategy and the thought leaders and okay, this is what we're going to do. But you have to have someone on the team that just follows those instructions, right?
Yeah, I mean, that's the only thing you can't really have an SOP for is the critical thinking. Everything else, like all of our other processes, our deliverables, our audits, our templates, when it comes to just even communicating with third parties, clients, you can have, but you can't— that and like soft skills are just two things that you can't necessarily put into an SOP.
Mm-hmm.
But everything else, for the most part, when it comes to SEO as a service provider, you should be able to make everything as predictable as possible. If you pivot frequently, then yeah, it probably makes things a little bit harder. You nailed it. SEO, sometimes you do things and you're like, this is going to kick ass, this is going to work so well. And then months later you're like, It didn't, it didn't work at all.
And it does for 80% of the industries. And then you find that one industry where you're like, it's just not taking it. Yeah. Right.
Yeah, exactly. And then you do need to be swift. You need to pivot certain strategies. You need to come up with new ideas or else, I mean, at the end of the day, what value then are you providing to the client?